쇼군2 토탈워 Eurogamer 2010.10.2 update : Previews - Shogun 2 Total War: Creative Assembly Interview

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Eurogamer 2010.10.2

In 2000, Creative Assembly sent tremors through the strategy genre with Shogun: Total War. A Civilization-style game with Red Alert-style live battles? Impossible! But it wasn't. What it turned out to be was the start of a consistently brilliant march through history, controlling the armies of the Romans, the medieval kings and queens, and even Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington.

Total War has had some beefy additions along the way - naval warfare and campaign multiplayer being the most significant. Nevertheless, a decade on and the series has come full-circle to Shogun II: Total War, a re-imagining of the game-that-started-it-all for today's considerable technology.

This Sunday, 3rd October, Mike Simpson - the godfather of Total War - will take to the Eurogamer Expo 2010 stage to present Shogun II: Total War alongside Shogun: Total War and show you what has changed. But before he can do so, Eurogamer him down for a chat about what he'll be presenting and why Shogun II: Total War will be the best in the series yet.

Eurogamer: You've been described as the godfather of Total War - are you a violent person?

Mike Simpson: I'm not a violent person, no - quite the opposite. Except in games, of course, where all bets are off [giggles maniacally]. The whole studio spent years playing first-person shooters, starting with Counter-Strike every lunchtime. So I guess we have a long history of blowing bits off each other.

Eurogamer: But as the creator of Total War, if it came down to it, you could command an army couldn't you?

Mike Simpson: Oh yeah.

Eurogamer: Do you have preference about which army that would be?

Mike Simpson: An imaginary one! It's not a real world. It's playing around with history, playing around with things that happened. I don't think I'd like to command an army in the real world because I know what it's like.

Eurogamer: Shogun and Shogun II are based heavily on Sun Tzu's famous teachings. Do you use one Art of War teaching above others?

Mike Simpson: One rule? I dunno. The genius of Sun Tzu is that he's a lot like a programmer in that he came up with long, long lists of rules which actually had numbers in them. So he'd say things like, "If you outnumber your enemy five to one, envelop him; if you outnumber him three to one, engage him." It's almost like programming. And there are lots and lots and lots of individual rules.

Eurogamer: But if his teachings translate so easily into programming code, then your AI is going to be unstoppable!

Mike Simpson: That would be true if all things were perfect, but computer AI struggles to be as inventive and clever as he was. A human has always got a chance. It's only in finite games like chess where computer AI will generally beat your average human.

Eurogamer: And how long until computers take over from humans?

Mike Simpson: That's an interesting question.

Eurogamer: A rough guess? 2050?

Mike Simpson: No, no, it'll be longer than that. Doing real AI that actually thinks like a human is vastly more difficult. In the last almost 20 years that I've been working on games, it hasn't really progressed very much. We still really do the same kind of AI that we did back in the eighties. They're obviously a lot more sophisticated and use more processing power, but it's not really proper AI. Dumbness-avoidance is probably a better way of looking at it rather than artificial intelligence; we do a lot of dumbness avoidance.

Eurogamer: What will you be talking about in your Eurogamer Expo 2010 session?

Mike Simpson: We're going to run through Shogun II. It's 10 years since we did Shogun 1, so we'll be doing a bit of a retrospective comparison on the way things have changed and the way things haven't changed. A lot of things are remarkably similar to the way they were 10 years ago.

Eurogamer: Did you think things would be similar in the future when you were making Shogun 1?

Mike Simpson: We thought a lot of things would move on more than they have. We still find ourselves having arguments over the same bits of code that we were arguing about in Shogun 1. We're still struggling to come up with a better AI behaviour for a particular encounter. For example, things like 'kiting' the AI, that's always a tricky one, where players drag enemies out of formation and then deal with them one at a time.

Most games have that problem one way or the other but it's particularly important in ours, because if you can pull units out one by one against a superior force, well, you're going to win. But on the other hand you can't just sit there and ignore enemy units: there are times when you need to come out and chase off archers or whatever. There's a really fine balance there. That bit of code is something we have long discussions about, every project.

Eurogamer: Will you treat the Eurogamer Expo audience to a live samurai demonstration?

Mike Simpson: No, no samurai! That would be a health and safety problem I suspect.

Eurogamer: That's alright - I can get them to waive it

Eurogamer: You must do a bit of that, though - trying on equipment, swishing swords, dressing up.

Mike Simpson: That's not compulsory, but we do have samurai swords sitting around the office. We use them in the motion capture a lot. There's a very fine pair of samurai swords that one of the clans gave to us.

Eurogamer: Is it weird going back to Shogun 1?

Mike Simpson: No it's not weird, but we didn't think we would go back - there were plenty of other things we wanted to do first. But going back is like going back to an old friend. It's probably our - it's certainly my favourite period. It's the coolest of all of them. It has the most interesting units, it has the coolest content. The whole of that era and setting is more alien than most of the other periods.

Eurogamer: Shogun II has hero units, has blossoms, has thunderstorms - dramatic stuff. Are you hamming it up?

Mike Simpson: Oh yes. It's absolutely important to ham it up! It's supposed to be fun. I mean, it is fun. If there's ever a contest between something that's fun and something that's historical, fun will win.

Eurogamer: What's the best unit you've got in Shogun II - what's the most powerful unit?

Mike Simpson: There's a lot of unit customisation in the game, so you can probably take any two or three or four of the top units and customise them up to be the best unit. But the hero units are probably the most powerful, but they're quite small, so they can be swarmed. There's no simple answer to that question.

Eurogamer: What's the most ridiculous thing that you've got in Shogun II?

Mike Simpson: Samurai with rocket launchers! That sounds more ridiculous than it actually is, because they did have them, and they generally caused mayhem and fear.

Eurogamer: What's the reaction been like to Shogun II from the fans - are you looking forward to showing it off to people?

Mike Simpson: It's without a doubt the best-looking Total War game we've made. Art and style has been a big focus for the project, making something with artistic merit as well as being a great game. So, yeah, we are looking forward to showing it off.

Eurogamer: When you made Shogun, PCs were like calculators. What can you do now that you couldn't then?

Mike Simpson: Making the battlefields real. When we first started we had little tiny sprite men who didn't look very good - in fact, they were pretty shocking. Battlefields were all like golf courses, all rolling hills because that's basically all we could do. Gradually, as the technology has progressed, we brought more trees in and started to put some rockiness into the terrain and rivers in. And gradually these cartoons have become more like real worlds. Every step along the way we go a bit further in that direction, to the point now where instead of those tiny horrible-looking sprites, each of the thousands of characters on screen looks like a character would in a much smaller gamer. It looks perfect, and you can see out across a massive landscape. That's the idea we've had right from the start, but how we succeed in doing that has changed dramatically. We probably do have something like 200-times the processing power that we had back on Shogun 1.

Eurogamer: Over the years you've added various new features to the Total War series. The big ones I can think of are naval battles and campaign multiplayer. Are there still any massive features you've yet to integrate?

Mike Simpson: Yes, there probably are. We've talked a lot about what they might be. We have three games in one: the campaign, the field battles and naval battles. But there are whole new games we could do, not that we would any time soon. There's loads more stuff, actually.

Eurogamer: Can you give us a tease of one of these things?

Mike Simpson: I can tell you what we're not going to do! [Laughs] We're not going to do a beat-'em-up where you can do one-on-one challenges.

Eurogamer: Duels between agents?

Mike Simpson: We're not going to do that either. But you could conceive of a whole new game with that. But that's something that we're not going to do as it would take up too much of the players' time. That's a valuable resource, and we already flirt with using it too much.

Eurogamer: You've promised big things for Shogun II multiplayer. Can you say what they are?

Mike Simpson: Not yet.

Eurogamer: Are they new things?

Mike Simpson: Well the challenge that I set the group that's been working on multiplayer was to revolutionise the way it's played. With a lot of PC games you get more people playing the multiplayer than you do the single-player, but ours is the other way around. We wanted to even that up a bit to the point where multiplayer was an equal partner with the rest of the game. That's what we're trying to do.

Eurogamer: The game's due out in 2011 - what's left to do?

Mike Simpson: We're actually at the interesting stage where we've got our feature set as was first planned and we're kind of linking them; deciding which bits worked really well, which bits worked less well. Some features we'll delete, some features we'll redraft to make them work better. This is actually the most interesting part of the project - trying to get it work well together.

Mike Simpson is creative director of Creative Assembly and the godfather of Total War.

GameArena Shogun 2: Total War Roundtable Interview

GameArena took part in an roundtable Q and A with Jamie Ferguson (Lead Designer), James Russell: (Design lead on Total War series) and Kevin McDowell (Lead Artist) – who are working on Shogun 2: Total War. For our Shogun 2: Total War Preview, head here.

Creative Assembly on the gameplay differences between Shogun 2 and other games of the Total War series.
James Russell: It’s one of these great examples where in a new era and a new setting, the change in the way the combat is fought means we can add a lot more to the gameplay. It delivers a better experience by representing something different. The same is true when it comes to naval battles. The ones in 18th Century European conflict was really about who could bring the most guns to bear on the enemy so you just brought the biggest ship.

In Japanese naval battles, the ships are like floating castles so you’ve different types of samurai on them, there are more mobile ships with archers on them... there’s a lot more ‘stone / scissors / paper’ dynamics between different ships going on. It’s this that makes the gameplay much more interesting.

We’ve also added land to the naval battles so we now have islands and different types of terrain – this adds so much when it comes to tactical opportunities. You can use the terrain to hide your weaker ships, screen them with your strong melee fighting ships… it also makes it more accessible because you have a frame of reference that helps orientate the player instead of having an expansive, open ocean.

Jamie Ferguson: The fact that you’ve got those islands means you can block off areas of the game from access by the enemy and you can use big slow ships as walls, effectively. You can then put your archery and missile units behind which you can then use to fire over. There’s a very different feel to the naval battles. You don’t have that freeform sort of movement that becomes very hard to control. It’s all very direct.

JR: We think it offers a lot more tactical depth, even though it’s easier to play.


The Creative Assembly Army

On the game’s in-game agents (Geishas, ninjas and the like)
JR: All of them have an interaction with armies. You can embed them in your own army so the ninja will help improve the army’s abilities, the monk will help inspire the army and so on. The monk can demoralise enemy armies, the ninja can assassinate enemy generals and sabotage them so they can’t move so there’s all these interesting interactions. Again, we’ve tried to keep it simple but have the greatest amount of depth.

On their development techniques…
Kevin McDowell: We used motion capture and got the British Kendo Association in to do all our combat stuff. The mechanics on the battlefield is such that the game matches enemy troops and they lock in to matched animations. That’s based on combat results that have been generated by the engine.

JF: There’s a certain level that - because we’re presenting a real world environment - you get a realistic look at what you might find on a real battlefield.

KM: We actually think we have more realistic combat than what you’d see in an action game because in action games, you don’t have exact matched combat.

JR: We’ve spent a lot of time researching battle tactics of each era and the way each unit was used. We made sure that for each unit type that it behaves in an appropriate way and that each strength is portrayed accurately.
The philosophy behind the battles is to have real-world tactics and that’s key in making the game intuitive because people have a natural understanding in what feels right. I don’t think any other game quite does what we do in terms of portraying all those thousands and thousands of men with each individual man executing his own actual combat mechanics. That’s what makes it feel visceral and the combat look so good because we don’t have stereotypical rule sets. Each man behaves as they would have.


Someone use an enhancing tool and we'll see what he's working on!

On taking Shogun 2 to consoles
JR: We’ve definitely considered that. Absolutely. It’s on our radar but we don’t have any concrete plans at the moment. The key thing for us is that if we go down that road we wouldn’t just want to do a port. The experience in your living room on a console is different from the kind of experience you want on a PC so we would want to make the game right for the platform. Of course there’s all sorts of platforms to consider as well and we have a lot of things we’re considering about what we’re going to do with Total War. The key thing is that the experience is right for the platform.
For us we have the potential of going a pretty different route because we’ve got these epic cinematic real-time battles. We might want to do something more there, instead of going down the turn-based strategy route. Who knows?

On multiplayer modes in Shogun 2.
JF: We’re still adding new stuff at the moment and working on seeing how that actually plays out. But there will definitely be all the features that you had in Napoleon… but we’re looking to do a lot more.

KM: Basically we have a team that works on battle, a team that works on campaign and now we have a team that works on multiplayer. It’s just that we’re just not quite ready to disclose what we’re doing there yet.

JR: We want to make sure it works really well, but there will definitely be more multiplayer possibilities than before.


Jamie Ferguson, Lead Designer and Pro Thumbs Up man

Shogun 2: Total War is scheduled for release in March 2011. Be sure to keep watching The Benny and Richie Show on GameArena (and soon to be T-Box) for a further video interview with James Russell and some footage inside Creative Assembly’s Horsham (England) HQ.

GameArena Shogun 2: Total War Preview

On tour in the UK, GameArena’s Benny and Richie Show recently had exclusive access to key members of Creative Assembly to find out more about Shogun 2: Total War.

While key aspects of the game remain under lock-and-key, Jamie Ferguson (Lead Designer), James Russell: (Design Lead on Total War series) and Kevin McDowell (Lead Artist) offered some of their philosophies in the making of this upcoming strategy game. Read it in Part Two of this special feature.



But first, a quick re-cap and some early impressions: for those who haven’t followed the news or series, Creative Assembly and Sega are bringing Shogun back after a ten-year hiatus. The original Shogun: Total War was released back in 2000 to fairly widespread acclaim. Since then, the developer has expanded the series to include titles Medieval: Total War, Rome: Total War, Empire: Total War and Napoleon: Total War and through these releases has developed a respectable reputation in not only the genre of strategy games itself but also - in general terms - the historical accuracy of its releases.

Some facts about Shogun 2… set in 16th Century Japan, there will be nine playable clans; pre-battle speeches (similar to Rome Total War and around 100,000 variations); new siege mechanics; more varied terrain; four seasons on the battlefield; five-stage castle sieges (meaning castles have more than just the outer wall); morale boosting buildings now exist (protect or capture a shrines or temples say, and it will influence the morale of troops, naval engagements will be fought off the coast and there will be unique ‘Hero’ units (certain individuals are able to carve through enemies).



After watching on through two battles (one land and one sea-based), what we can tell you is that the landscapes appear more dynamic in that they have a more direct influence on gameplay. Mountainous terrain for example, poses more problems for troops as they have trouble going up. Also, natural choke points look like they’ll play a fairly prominent role: something that will obviously have a major influence strategically. Visually, Shogun is already stunning. There are particle effects on the buildings, in rain water will pools across the battlefields, troops get wet, water will trickle from roofs and in turn, light will bounce off this.

When it comes to naval battles, the oar-powered ships seemed easier to steer and that closer combat, near shorelines, will be order the day and taking down enemy ships will have an affect on enemy morale. A port to building your naval fleet will be available from the beginning but it won’t be until later in the game – and once you’ve developed your tech tree – that you’ll be able to build better boats (with capacity for more men and featuring bigger firing platforms).



GameArena also checked out ninjas and Geisha characters in action. Essentially, they work as super assassins (particularly the geishas) who are able to sneak into enemy camps to take down key characters, like Generals.

In addition, GameArena learned some other tidbits of trivia. The score (which sounds brilliant) has been done right here in Australia by Queensland-based Canadian Jeff van Dyck – the former EA man also provided the music for Rome: Total War and Medieval: Total War.

Creative Assembly also stated that while system specs are not yet final, the demands on rigs will be similar to those needed to run Napoleon: Total War.


To read what Jamie Ferguson (Lead Designer), James Russell: (Design lead on Total War series) and Kevin McDowell (Lead Artist) had to say about Shogun 2

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/battle-types-shogun-2/704825#comments_top

 http://www.gametrailers.com/video/battle-types-shogun-2/704825

Dave Cook 14:55, Monday 13th September 2010

We speak to the The Creative Assembly's Mark O' Connell about the art of war.

It’s been ten years since the original Shogun was released. In what ways do you feel technology has caught up with Creative Assembly’s original vision for the first game? What key technical advancements of the last decade have allowed you to make this game the way you wanted?
Technology has come a long way in the ten years since Shogun: Total War was released. In fact, this is one of the main factors in wanting to return to the period. We had a lot of ideas that simply weren’t possible a decade ago, and now we are able to go back and make the game we originally wanted to. Naval battles started life as auto-resolvable affairs, rather than the fully 3D real-time battles that debuted in Empire: Total War.

'There can only be one!' Hang on...

After a successful Beta, Napoleon: Total War introduced the much requested co-op multiplayer Campaign mode, a feature which will be making a return for Shogun 2. Of course, since our last release, our technology has continued to evolve, promising to make Shogun 2 the most polished, visually stunning and well-rounded game to date. 

The Total War series is steeped in history and legend. To what extent did the Creative Assembly research 16th Century Japan before development started? Is this research an ongoing process?
It’s fair to say our team is massively interested in history. A lot of the guys spend half of their time buried in books or watching cool samurai films. We’re always looking ahead to our next titles, so we’re always thinking about which period or style we should adopt for future games. In that respect, there’s a lot of background general historical research that goes on.

“We've never, ever ruled out bringing the Total War series to consoles.”

In terms of specific research for Shogun 2, our designers and artists have absolutely thrown themselves into the history books head-first. For these guys it’s a passion. We have also been consulting extensively with Professor Stephen Turnbull, Britain’s foremost expert on the time period and worked with us on the original Shogun: Total War.

Are the nine available fiefdoms historically accurate? Can we expect key figures from the era such as Nobunaga to appear? In what ways do each of the nine fiefdoms differ in terms of battle tactics and strengths.
Everything in the game is as historically accurate as we can make it and as great to play as we can make it. We can’t say just yet exactly who from history might be appearing in the game – we’ll have to leave that to the guys on our forums to speculate on for the time being. Regarding the fiefdoms, they’ll each be distinct in some way from the other.

War never looked so good

The Total War series features a superb grasp of real warfare tactics that span several centuries. Did the Creative Assembly confer with any military tacticians or historians to capture these strategies? How does the team ensure such tactics remain balanced across all fiefdoms?
As well as consulting with Professor Stephen Turnbull, who I mentioned earlier, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at the historical tactics of the time.

The AI has to be believable, engaging and make the best use possible of the weaponry it has – just like these great warriors did historically. Balancing tactics is something that really comes with iteration and careful play testing. We iterate and iterate and iterate tactically until we’re absolutely sure something matches up as closely as possible with history – and is also being great fun to play.

We understand that players will be able to make use of hero troops such as the warrior monk Saitō Benkei. How will these individuals affect the field and will they level up as the campaign progresses?
Hero troops will represent a great source of power on the battlefield. We’re not saying they’re going to be able to win battles single-handedly, but careful use of them could be enough to swing a battle – or even a war - in your favour. Saitō Benkei really existed, and he was an inspiration to us when researching the game.

Quality in numbers

Over time, the man and the legend have become one as his deeds have been retold time and again. We want people playing Shogun 2 to feel connected to that intense feeling of honour and loyalty. We want them to bond with these guys. As a result, leveling your hero units up will be important. We can’t say too much about that right now, but rest assured it’s a big part of our plans.

Shogun 2 will allow for a reported 56,000 troops on the field at any one time. Where do you draw the line between the quality of the visuals and the sheer quantity? Is there ever a temptation to swing further one way?
I don’t think there is. It’s all about what feels right and accurate when we’re making the game. For Shogun 2, it was important that we had that feeling of huge waves of men cascading down a hillside. In a game like Empire: Total War, the focus was more on tightly-organised, slow-moving lines of units.

To an extent, battles in the Sengoku jidai period were skilled battles of attrition, where numbers could win out – but only if they were highly skilled, disciplined and honourable. As such, it wasn’t uncommon for battles to feature thousands of men. 
There might be a time where we decide we want more people on screen. We’ve done tech demos internally where we’ve had more people than that on screen, but it always comes down to a case of what’s the best fit for the game.

The concept art is stunning

The Onin war of the 16th Century was a time of betrayal and mass conflict. How large will the Shogun 2 campaign be and how deep is the lore concerning your re-telling of these years? Will betrayal play a part in the campaign or multiplayer?
Betrayal, mass conflict… we love this stuff. You can safely bet that any dastardly deeds that may have been carried out during the Sengoku jidai have been looked at hard by our designers and artists.We definitely aim to capture that feel in spades and integrate it into the mechanics of the game. We want the campaign to be absolutely absorbing and engaging. If people aren’t spending hours and hours playing our games, we’re doing something wrong.

Considering multiplayer, what can players expect from Shogun 2 in terms of competitive skirmishes and co-op? We’re not really talking about multiplayer at the moment – but we are really excited about it in-house. What I can tell you is that we’re aiming to make multiplayer in Shogun 2 better than any multiplayer experience we’ve ever created before. 
There are thousands and thousands of people out there who play Total War multiplayer hours and hours a week. We’re grateful for that, but we think we can offer them more still. We’re doing this for those guys, and I think they’re going to love it.

Shogun 2 will mark another PC-only entry to the Total War series. Isn't it about time we had the Total War experience on consoles? 
We’ve never, ever ruled out bringing the Total War series to consoles. But what we have always said is that the timing has to be right, the platform has to be right, the controls have to be spot-on and we have to offer the full Total War experience, not a watered down one. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s not worth making. But if we crack the problem of the control system, the way the game plays out, there’s nothing to say we’re not going to release a console Total War.

Did you just stab my horse?

What is your view on motion control methods in bringing this type of game to the home console space?
Our main view is that it needs to feel right. It’s relatively easy for us to knock together a prototype version of one of our games running on console, but whether it plays well or not is the clincher. It’s all about finding that sweet spot between complexity and simplicity. When we find it, we’ll let you know.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-gameplay-shogun-2/702267

SHOGUN 2: TOTAL WAR - From One on One to All-out Battles

By Lucas Siegel, Newsarama Editor
posted: 10 September 2010 11:55 am ET

Buzz up!

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When Sega decided to go back to the well in their Total War franchise, they decided to go way back. With Shogun 2: Total War, the starting point of their RTS behemoth becomes the source of their newest in the series; however, this is far from being just another Shogun or just another Total War.

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During a one-on-one demo, Sega showed Newsarama some of the new toys in this big, new toybox. The first thing people will notice about the game is its distinct style. To try to capture the feel of ancient Japanese artwork, that style is present in all aspects of the game. The map itself (which is huge, covering all of Japan) has a unique look. Rather than the "fog of war" typical to most strategy games, the unexplored areas of the map are depicted in a 2D art style, while the areas of the map you've been to are depicted in highly detailed 3D.

That rendering and style carries over to individual specialty units called "Agents." When you don't want to go into all-out battle, you can use and agent for more subtle and more sinister ways of taking down your enemy. Sega showed us two assassin agents, the Ninja and the Geisha. Dispatching an Agent against another, like a general, sets off a branching cutscene. Each cutscene has about 10 different outcomes. A ninja sneaking through a camp could trip over a sleeping enemy and wake him up, or could get by; he could jump from a tree to attack the general and stab him through, or get stabbed in return. It's a cool and unique way to make those attacks stay fresh throughout the game. Don't think your geisha or ninja can sneak anywhere though, as the Metsuka, the secret police, can detect them, setting off their own lethal cutscene. 

Each Agent also brings with them an RPG-style leveling system. Skill trees offer six levels of development, in several different directions. Once you choose one, that Agent is locked in- for example, Ninja can be a spy, saboteur, or assassin, and the supporting unlockable traits are thusly geared to each.

The game, so dependent on history, gives players some extra authenticity through their own history. You can view the history of your entire campaign from start to finish in a play-by-play style report. The team is trying to also allow clips of your game, but they couldn't confirm‎ that as a feature just yet.

A couple other teases were given about the overall campaign. If you take over a substantial amount of the map, the Emperor will declare you Shogun, but that doesn't mean you win. When that happens, everyone else turns on you, ramping up the difficulty of the game significantly, as you're suddenly fighting wars on multiple fronts. The campaign map reflects the changing seasons, and battlefields reflect weather and time of day. Campaigns will offer cooperative play as well as 1-on-1 versus, Sega confirmed as well, which further opens up the gameplay. When you're in all-out battle mode, if you are statistically near-assured victory, you can choose to auto-battle; especially useful when you have multiple fronts to manage.

Basically, even early on in this 2011 shipping game, Shogun 2: Total War looks like it will be one of the deepest strategy games ever. From up-close and personal assassinations to massive army-vs-army battles, from country-wide strategy to individuals leveled-up RPG style, this game seems to have it all, and should thrill PC Strategy gamers next year.

http://www.totalvideogames.com/Shogun-2-Total-War/feature-15635.html

Shogun 2: Total War Q&A Feature

Submitted by Gwynne Dixon on September 12 2010 - 18:01

Setting, depth over breadth, AI issues... The Creative Assembly discusses everything about the upcoming sequel...

• Creative Assembly
• SEGA
• Total War

The Creative Assembly returns to Feudal Japan with a sequel to the game that spawned the Total War series. TVG recently caught up with a few members from the team who shared their thoughts on the series, AI issues, and the inevitability of a return to Rome.

The original Shogun: Total War was obviously the first Total War game when it was released back in 2000, but you opted to do a sequel of Medieval: Total War (in 2006) before you returned to Shogun. Is there any particular reason for this? 

Kevin McDowell: Creative Assembly Australia did Medieval II and I think, in terms of content, Medieval II was closer to what we were doing with Rome. If you take the sequence of Rome followed by its expansion packs, it actually followed a timeline sequence, so it was kind of a logical step for the Creative Assembly Australia team. We passed the project to them, it was a new project for them, and it was kind of a safer project for them to be working on following through the same timeline and starting off with the European map.

James Russell: I think they wanted to do that project. With this one, we really wanted to do Shogun. The team was excited about doing this particular era. With Empire, having portrayed the whole world with massive scope . . . with Shogun what we’re really excited about doing is getting into a more contained setting where we can focus-in on one culture in exquisite detail.

Jamie Ferguson: It just seemed like a really good time to do it. It allows us to do something that we can really concentrate on and refine every element of the gameplay. Everything we’ve done over the last ten years means we can refine every bit of that and make it as good as we possibly can, work on the representation of it, the art and everything.

Shogun 2 is a really strongly art-lead project in the sense of how it looks and feels, and all of that dictates the user-interface, the units themselves, all of the effects, and the accessibility as well as the gameplay quality.

I suppose a lot of people in the Western world have an image of the art of feudal Japan but not necessarily the history. Unlike Empire and Rome where a campaign map is a campaign map, you’ve got the scope to do something more artistic with Shogun 2, one example being the parchment paper and painted Japanese symbols you use to denote unexplored areas of the campaign map... 

Jamie Ferguson: It’s a really interesting idea. You could look at it that way but it was more the case that we hadn’t really thought of it before [laughs].

Kevin McDowell: Every game that we do, we approach thinking equally about the theme and what’s appropriate about the theme. With Shogun certain things become obviously appropriate and doing these sorts of things with Empire would’ve been really difficult because Empire crosses a lot of different cultures. If you do something with Empire, which way are you going to do it? An English style, French style, American style or Indian style? So, with Empire, we had a more generic approach to the artwork. With Shogun, we kind of go all-out.

James Russell: It’s a lot more about exploration as well. Exploration is one of the themes that fits the time; that fits the setting, and I think for Empire that wasn’t necessarily the case . . . here we’ve got a feudal setting where the other side of Japan would’ve felt like a world away. We wanted to recreate that feeling of the unknown and that vast scope.

Critics have always lauded the AI in Total War games but, just judging from some of your team’s replies to comments on forum boards etc., I know that you’re often your own harshest critics when it comes to AI. Are there any particular flaws in the Empire games that you’re targeting specifically in Shogun 2? 

James Russell: I think we’re just determined that the AI is going to provide a challenge and be a compelling experience for the player. You don’t want it to ever be seen as a problem.

Kevin McDowell: It’s an extremely complex problem and it’s not easily solvable. You can’t solve a complex problem with a simple solution. Things will go wrong very easily...

Jamie Ferguson: If you’re trying to simplify, you end up with very silly looking AI. You say you’ve looked at the forums and there are many people who have some very strong misapprehensions as to the scale of the AI problem. I’ve seen certain people suggest that we can create chess computers that can beat humans... well, the chess computer problem is an order of magnitude smaller than that on the battlefield of the campaign map, literally by billions.

Kevin McDowell: Yeah, you have like 32 pieces and 64 squares.

Jamie Ferguson: That would be like a map that has 64 pixels, or 64 cells on it.

James Russell: I think from a battle perspective at least, one of the things that made it particularly tricky for Empire was that there were spatial issues going on because it’s a game about field of fire. Because melee is more important [in Shogun 2] I think that makes it less problematic. Fundamentally though, we’re working on it harder than we’ve ever worked on it before and we’re determined that it’s not going to be a problem.

Kevin McDowell: Basically, we’re aware of all the big issues that the community has brought up and we have a hit list of things that we’re targeting and solving.

So, you’re doing Shogun 2 and you’ve done Medieval II. The obvious question is would you like to go back to Rome: Total War and do a sequel? 

James Russell: We’ve got a big list of themes, ideas, and settings that we want to portray.

Kevin McDowell: I think we’d be mad to say that Rome II wasn’t on that list.

Jamie Ferguson: But there are so many other things as well. We’ve got 2,000 years between the birth of Christ and now, and 10,000 years before that in terms of gameplay to explore. Yes, we’ve come back to Shogun but that’s partly because people can’t even play the original game on PC anymore and there are a lot of people who didn’t play it ten years ago.

Jamie Ferguson: In the future at some point – inevitably at some stage – we will eventually, probably get around to it [Rome II].

Kevin McDowell: We will get around to it...

We’ve always loved Total War for its depth. Of course, the pressure is always on you guys to streamline the experience; make it simpler from a marketing perspective. How do you balance that? 

James Russell: What we’re trying to do here is both. We want to do more with less, so we want to streamline the game but actually make the gameplay deeper in many ways. The design analogy is kind of like Bonsai: we’re cutting off things that are extraneous; that don’t really fit the form, creating this perfect thing that’s streamlined but actually has beauty and depth.

There’s a lot there that will add to depth, but we take things out to add depth as well. If you think about the master of the arts and technologies, the fact that there are fewer than before doesn’t mean that there’s less gameplay in many respects. There’s more because each one can mean a lot more and we can make sure that you’re not researching parallels, so you don’t end up getting through the entire tech tree. Instead, you have to make choices with a branching system that propels you down one way or the other. Hopefully you’ll see that the RPG progression element and the characters certainly add a lot of gameplay depth but, at the same time, it’s not a sort of bulky feeling that will intimidate new players.

I think we counted the actions in Empire and it was something like 114 actions. The point is, that doesn’t really add depth...

Kevin McDowell: No, it adds breadth.

James Russell: Yeah, it adds breadth; it makes the situation more complex. Actually, we did a lot of honing down when we started with Empire but with Shogun 2 we've really tried to hone it down and create that experience where you’ll still have just as much depth. Even with the map itself, although it’s much more focused on a single nation, it’s still on an epic scale; the whole of Japan still feels like an enormous place. The map is actually just as big as it has been before [in previous Total War games] but it just feels cleaner, more contained and simpler. It’s got just as much depth.

Kevin McDowell: Japan is very mountainous, so there are a lot of different routes and paths, and there’s a kind of strategic layer to the actual physical map that isn’t really present in Empire and before.

Jamie Ferguson: For any hardcore Total War player, there’s going to be enough in the map that they’re going to angst over what choices to make, what paths to take, and whether that will suit the war that they want to fight. If you’ve picked a faction that’s great with cavalry and your nearest region that supplies cavalry is three regions away, and that faction also needs some iron to make samurai units that’s in the opposite direction, then where do you go first? You’ve got to make a choice and those choices are meaningful and impact the game.

People do play our games, come back to them later and then realise that there are things which they never realised were there.

James Russell: Even some of our development team!

In your presentation, the variation in cut-scenes for agent characters like the Ninja and Geisha seemed more context sensitive than ever before. You’ve had those scenes in Total War games for a number of years now – which depict either a successful kill or failed attempt – but it looks like you’ve put more focus into them for Shogun 2... 

Jamie Ferguson: Yeah, I mean those videos aren’t just a canned sequence. The beginning will change, the middle will change, and the end will change.

It seemed that way in the presentation. It was a Ninja whose stealth skills hadn’t been levelled-up much but he was a cut-throat assassin (pardon the pun), and that was reflected in a video sequence where he was clumsy getting into the enemy encampment but deadly with his katana sword... 

Jamie Ferguson: That’s part of the accessibility thing. You’re drawing the player in, you’re rewarding their actions, and you’re explaining their actions to them.

The next question is on the naval battle engine, which was obviously a big new feature in Empire. I’m not sure what the Shogun setting allows you to do with that but I know that it’s something that perhaps you guys didn’t think was perfect in Empire... 

Kevin McDowell: It was actually quite difficult to get it right, or to get it to feel right because in many ways the great navies of the 18th century didn’t design themselves around cool gameplay.

James Russell: They are actually pretty realistic in Empire. It’s very challenging to design a compelling experience when there are lots of issues: the fact that you move in the opposite way to which you shoot means that you tend to get awkward combat. What’s great about this period is that the 18th century stuff is very much about who brings the most guns to bear on the enemy – it’s kind of ‘bigger is better’ – whereas here you actually have a proper rock, paper, scissors relationship between different unit types. You’ve got boarding specialists with lots of melee, samurais, floating castles where you can board the enemy and charge on, and then there are missile units as well. The boats are also controlled by oars rather than wind power, so it makes it much simpler to understand but actually there’s more gameplay in many ways.

Jamie Ferguson: It’s actually much more like land battles because you’ve got islands and coastlines and all of these kinds of things that act like cliffs, bluffs, or chokepoints. Having ships that are rowed, you have this situation of saying ‘go there’ and they will go there, you know?

Kevin McDowell: You click on it, it moves, and it stops.

Jamie Ferguson: It doesn’t have to tack, it doesn’t have to do a box all to turn around – it literally just goes exactly where you tell it to.  Again, when it comes to boarding, with 18th century ships it’s like bringing in an aeroplane to land, whereas with a rowing ship it’s like, ‘bring it up alongside’. The issues that we’ve had to deal with have been quite different and separate. With what we have now it’s more about the fact that we have a tiny ship and a big ship, or how we get guys actually interacting with each other when they’re boarding.

James Russell: The addition of land is just such a massive change.

Jamie Ferguson: You get the feeling that you’re in a place and not some weird, locked-off universe, which you could sometimes feel playing Empire. You were either out in the middle of the ocean or deep inland.

With your Empire and Medieval: Total War games, there are elements of the warfare that instantly come to mind. For Empire it’s ranged gunfire, and for Medieval it’s strongholds (for us at least). Perhaps it’s a little harder to visualise that with Shogun. What would you say the defining factors are? 

Jamie Ferguson: I’d say beauty and violence. It’s both extremes and both of them are in your face; you can’t avoid them. A very strong sense of the purpose of units and the purpose of castles and so on... all of those things have a very strong, clearly understandable mechanic to the player and they lend themselves to the player. The player doesn’t necessarily search for it.

Creative Assembly’s developers appear to have the privilege of working on one of the few remaining grown-up games these days – not in the sense that it’s 18 rated but in the sense that you can imagine your dad playing it and being impressed. Is it a pleasure being in that position rather than making ‘kid’s games’, for want of a better phrase? 

Kevin McDowell: We’re all here because we chose to be here and work on these games.

Jamie Ferguson: That’s not to say that we don’t try and make it accessible to kids.

Kevin McDowell: If there are any kids playing our games, they’re probably mature kids, you know? Like the smart kid in the class.

Jamie Ferguson: If the letters we’ve had are something to go by then sometimes Total War has actually been that thing which changed a kid who wasn’t interested into somebody who was. We’ve had guys who’ve ended up going to university having played Shogun and done Japanese studies, or they started when they played Rome and then studied Ancient History.

James Russell: We’ve all got a passion for strategy games and a passion for history.

Jamie Ferguson: What could be better if you love history then having to get up in the morning and read history?

How many history books do you all read? Is there a suggested reading list at the start of each project? 

James Russell: We all immerse ourselves and it’s not scripted because actually I think it’s quite important for every different person in the team to have their own angle, so it’s actually quite important for us not to be prescriptive but what we are prescriptive about is that everyone’s immersed in the period and knows their stuff. We don’t have reading lists but there are certainly books and movies that people will pass around.

Jamie Ferguson: Scattered around the team, there are a good 30 or 40 books that have been read, 15 or so movies, and enormous amounts of reference material.

James Russell: Stephen Turnbull has come down and talked to us as well. He wrote half the books that we’re consuming and he bought down some period armour as well, so we got our hands on some actual period armour.

Jamie Ferguson: Having somebody like him on-board has been invaluable, especially considering there aren’t that many of us who can speak Japanese and none of us who can read Medieval Japanese.


TVG would like to thank Kevin McDowell, Lead Artist on the Total War team, James Russell, Lead Designer on the TW team and Jamie Ferguson, Design Lead and Battle Design Lead on Shogun 2 for sharing their thoughts on the game.

http://www.dealspwn.com/shogun-2-preview-interview-creative-assembly/

Shogun 2 Preview: An Interview With Creative Assembly

It was a surprising decision by Creative Assembly to go right back to where they started. Everyone was focused on the inevitable (still) Rome 2. Nobody expected a return to the curious lands of feudal Japan with Shogun 2, but now we’ve all seen it, it’s looking luscious. David Brown spoke toJames Russell, Kevin McDowell and Jamie Ferguson recently and asked them a few question that you might not have seen asked anywhere else. Perhaps you have. If so, boo to you, smarty-pants. Just pretend you didn’t and carry on reading the words below:

DB – You’ve got fog of war in the game that completely obscures landscape you haven’t discovered yet. Would this be realistic for the time? Would the Japanese clans really not know about lands outside their own territory?

James Russell – Actually, you know, they would have an idea of where certain clans were, they’d know where Kyoto was or other major cities, and there’d be certain major trunk routes that they might know about, but there’s a very famous of one particular tribe trying to make war and not actually being able to find a way out of their own kingdom. They got lost in the hills. I mean, it’s a medieval setting, so yeah, sure, people had ideas, they had maps, they knew where things were, but you certainly wouldn’t be able to have a bang-accurate knowledge of exactly where all the ports were a thousand miles away on the other end of Japan.

Kevin McDowell – A lot of the maps of the period still exist and man, they’re quite sketchy. That’s probably the best you could reasonably expect.

Jamie Ferguson – You have a knowledge of there being a number of regions and you can represent them accurately, and if you do fly over the parchment map (the way fog of war is being depicted in Shogun 2 – Ed) they’ll be delineated.

JR – Yeah, you’ll see the regions and the provincial capitals as well, but you don’t necessarily have diplomatic contacts with all these clans. It’s not like the geopolitics of the Empire period where, you know, you’ve got agents in pretty much every country in the world and you can immediately talk to anyone.

DB – Is using a parchment map for the fog of war as much a design decision as anything else, because of your previously stated desire to really bring the art style of feudal Japan to the game?

KD – We didn’t think too deeply about this particular design. Mike Simpson, the creative director, came up with this specific idea and using his ‘fantastic’ skills in Photoshop, merging the original Shogun with some current screenshots, presented this to us. We thought this was a bit odd, but we’ll give it a try and the amazing thing was that all the developers who’ve played it felt that it changed the way they approached the campaign map, because suddenly there’s a feeling of exploration and discovery, which previously we suddenly realised was missing, you know, from previous Total War games.

JR – It’s also nice to represent a shrouded area not in pitch darkness, so you do have a basic idea of the scope of the world and where things are.

DB – One of the new things you’ve put into Shogun 2 is the addition of RPG-like traits and levelling up for your generals and characters, but can you view the skills of the enemy’s units, to give you an idea of what you’re up against?

JR – Yeah, if you have spying information, but not by default. If you have a ninja nearby, you can then.

JF – We’ve kept the list of characters on the map that you can move around down to a very simple list. You’ve got your ninja, your geisha and then the metsuke (kind of like a policeman – Ed), who’s kind of your counter to those first two. Then there are the monks, who are used for bribery and pacification.

JR – Basically, we’ve got a triangle, a stone-scissors-paper relationship where every agent has a counter, where every agent can be undermined by another, but we also want to make sure that every agent has a specific function against every kind of target. So the ninja always has something he can do against an enemy city or an enemy army, and they also have a purpose in your own cities and within your own armies. You could stick a monk in your own army and he’d do something specific, or in an enemy army and he’d do something else.

DB – How do your characters gain experience? Like for a general, to get XP, does he have to go around fighting a lot, that sort of thing?

JR – The key point is you don’t have to do a specific activity to level up in it. That’s the key thing here, that you get to choose how to develop your character. You use the character how you want to use them, then you make a choice as to how to specialise them. You might get experience for winning any kind of battle, and if that takes you over the edge, you level up as it were, and you might then decide to make your general a great administrator instead or a great personal warrior on the battlefield. You aren’t forced to increase his abilities based on what you’ve just done. That’s what the old system kind of did, you’d get the trait awarded passively. It wasn’t random, it was driven by how you used them, but here you have a proper choice.

DB – If you just leave a general in a city, though, does he get experience from administering that city, or do you have to go out and fight?

JR – Er, you kind of have to go and fight, yes. You could argue that he would from a real-world perspective, but you could also say, you know, he’s only going to get that life experience out on campaign. If you look at a game like Rome: Total War, in many respects the administrators, by having to go through times of hardship and administer their armies in times of difficulty. We want to make sure you have to risk the character to make him better, you know.

JF – There are also game reasons too, ignoring the history for a minute. We want people to be acting on their characters, using them and being involved in events. There’s no risk to just sitting in a castle, so the rewards don’t really come. You won’t feel as if you’ve achieved anything.

DB – The important question is do you have Battlefield Ninja?

JF – Yes, we do.

DB – Battlefield Monks?

JF – Warrior monks, yes, them too. The battlefield ninja aren’t as fantastical as you’d imagine. They’re kind of like Special Ops, wearing normal samurai armour but blacked up, hiding in long grass waiting for a general to come past and gank him from behind.

JR – We have several units of warrior monks, and they’ve all got precedent.

JF – We also played with the idea, which might not work, of having warrior nuns as well. You know, history’s a richer place than many people think. Sometimes you might think “oh, that never happened,” then you find out that it did, and not only that, but it happened a lot! Same thing with female warriors as well, female samurai. There’s a lot of variety.

DB – How do you go about improving your technological level now, as it’s not tied down to what buildings you have in your city?

JF – The Japanese view of the world was more about arts and the way of things, even with respect to developing technology. The development of sword manufacture was an art, not a science, something that was passed down from father to son as a craft, rather than a very scientific study of metals and swords.

JR – Thematically, we’re calling it mastery of the arts, but fundamentally it is equivalent to the tech tree from Empire. Because we’re treating it as a mastery of the arts, you can’t trade them, like how you might be able to trade formulae and so on like you could before. But, you know, we do incorporate scientific-like developments, the most obvious one being firearms, which I think we called Powder Mastery, which would give you the ability to manufacture muskets without converting to Christianity, which is something the Japanese did about 10 years after the Europeans arrived. They became very effective at manufacturing their own guns and in many respects became masters, producing some of the best muskets in the world.

JF – Because of the Japanese approach, they weren’t just making them as particularly effective guns, they’d also be something you could put on your wall. It goes to that peculiar Japanese thing where form and function are two intertwined concepts, rather than being separate.

DB – You’ve changed the way the game ends in Shogun 2, going back to something that’s a bit like Rome’s Senate breakaway ending, right?

JR – It’s sort of analogous, it’s not quite identical. What we wanted to do is create an endgame, which you can trigger early if you want by marching on Kyoto and declaring yourself Shogun, but we’re working on how it’s balanced. What we want to do is create a really climactic endgame that gives you a proper challenge at the end, avoiding that kind of mopping up problem you’d get if you were dominating the map in earlier games. We don’t necessarily have every single clan immediately declare war on you. Your allies might stick by you for a bit, but there’ll be continual pressure and they might eventually turn on you.

JF – It’s very closely related to the truth of that period, like how Oda Nobunaga was the first to declare himself Bukafu of Japan. He wasn’t able to call himself Shogun as he didn’t have noble lineage, but he died just a short while after the declaration. Immediately, loads of others started proclaiming themselves Shogun. One, Hiyoshi, set up himself up as Shogun and everyone turned on him. It’s that kind of thing, being too big for your boots.

DB – How important is the European influence later on?

JR – What the Europeans do is give you access to firearms technology early. You could develop it yourself, but it’d take a lot longer. Converting to Christianity can cause all sorts of problems, it might cost you honour or affect your ability to do various other things, cause unrest. We want to offer the choice, but what we absolutely don’t want is for all players to just say “Oh, I’m going to be Christian” all the time. We want it to feel like two completely different ways to play the game. If you go with the Christians, you get access to cannons, while if you concentrate of firearms, you won’t get the top-level archers in the game, the Bow Heroes. There’s no wrong choice, they’re just different.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/previews/8097-Shogun-2-Total-War-Campaign-Preview.2

Shogun 2 Total War Campaign Preview

by Steve Butts, 11 September 2010 4:22 am

Filed under: steve butts, shogun 2, shogun 2 total war

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I stare at the wide map laid out in front of me. My two provinces of Hojo territory along the coast seem pitifully small compared to the yards and yards of yellowed parchment stretching far to the north. But there is no time to dream of the conquests to come, not with the treacherous Imagawa clan right on my borders to the west. Before I can even contemplate moving north and taking on the more powerful warlords, I have to eliminate my more immediate threats.

I have an army ready to march, but despite the loyalty of my Takeda allies to the north, I can't risk losing my men or their capable general in a pitched battle against the invading Imagawa army. The army is led by a mighty general whose skill will surely put me at a disadvantage on the field of battle. Knowing that if I cut off the head, the snake will die, I call on my Geisha. Though she is known for her skill as an entertainer, in reality, she is a highly trained assassin. I send her to meet the invading army's general on the march and "entertain" him.

I watch as she enters the enemy camp in the middle of the night, creeping silently through ranks on her way to the general's quarters. She passes by, unseen by sentries, and approaches the large tent. Stepping inside, she finds the general lying on his bunk with his back to her. She slowly crosses the room as we see that, though his body is still, the general's eyes are wide and alert. The scene transitions outside the tent and we hear a sickening sound as our Geisha's efforts are thwarted. Back on the campaign map, she mutters a brief apology and dies before my eyes. I will have to build more gambling halls before I can find more of her kind.

Scanning the map before me, a shuriken symbol above a friendly town reminds me that I have other agents I can use. A nearby Ninja in my employ is waiting there for me to send him to spy on or sabotage the enemy. Unlike the Geisha, the Ninja can move invisibly across the map, just so long as he avoids enemy Matsuka, the secret police who are valued not only for their ability to spot Ninja, but also for their role in bribing enemy armies.

My Ninja is more skilled, or at least luckier, than my Geisha. After approaching the enemy army undetected, he picks his way through the camp, nearly tripping over a sleeping guard, which under any other circumstances would raise the alarm and bring a quick and unsuccessful end not only to the Ninja's mission but also to his life. He is lucky this night as he steals his way to the general's tent, and luckier still that the general is finally asleep. Dropping down from above, the Ninja makes quick and messy work of the general before fleeing the camp.

Back on the map, the Ninja drops a smoke bomb and emerges from the cloud in a grander outfit that reveals the new abilities he has gained through experience. In time, I can train this Ninja to become an expert escape artist, or a clever saboteur, or an inconspicuous spy. But that can wait. The Imagawa clan now knows that its general has been murdered and, fearing the inevitable arrival of Matsuka, our Ninja retreats north to hide in friendly Takeda territory.

With the enemy general dead, I'm free to lead my own forces against the invading enemy army. Without the benefit of a leader, trained in the various arts of attack and defense, the enemy army falls before our spears and arrows. Our own general, fresh from the victory, can be promoted and learn new skills, such as siege craft or improved command of our peasant levies. Should we have more use of provincial governors, our general might instead be endowed with certain civic advantages.

Since we mean to press on and destroy the Imagawa, our general dispenses with the peaceful promotions of government and instead learns the ways of siege attacks. As he pushes into Imagawa lands, he burns the enemy's farms and rice plantations. Food is more valuable than gold to a nation. We'll see how well Imagawa's armies fight on an empty stomach. Still, we don't want to destroy too much. When we take over these regions, we'll use the farms and plantations to support massive fortifications to fend off any attacks on our own territory.

It sounds like we'll need them. There are rumors that the nearby Chosokabe clan has built a big enough harbor to attract a strange people known as the "Dutch." These Dutch offered to share the secret of gunpowder with Chosokabe, and the lure of the strange new technology forced the clan to give in to Dutch demands to convert to Christianity. Now their Monks are wandering the land, converting people from Buddhism and generating much unhappiness. Still, the Christian monks are no different from the Buddhists in their disloyal attempts to have my Matsuka renounce their duty to the clan and stop seeking out Ninjas.

Worst of all, this new Dutch weapon has armed peasants with guns that can kill our Samurai. This goes against the code of Bushido. Chosokabe dishonors himself by this choice, and though he gains a powerful weapon on the battlefield, it will be harder to maintain the loyalty of his officers. We will watch and wait as his most insightful advisors, his ablest generals, and his most trusted governors abandon him. He might reclaim some honor if he orders his generals to commit seppuku, but if he orders and they refuse, he will find them turning into Ronin and stealing part of his army.

Given time, we might discover the secrets of gunpowder weapons on our own. But the more effort we put into uncovering the secrets of Bushido, the less we can put into the path of Chi, which helps us to increase happiness, honor and holiness among our people. Shall we trust in our military might to win the day? Or can we rely on the health and happiness of our people to turn back military attacks?

We will watch and wait. Next year, the battle will begin.

[DarkPhoenix]

번역or 3줄 요약좀...ㅠ

[도마]

역사 고증
AI 강화
멀티플레이 강화

[DarkPhoenix]

ㅈ..조흔 3줄요약이다

[[Beta]시라]

다른건 다 믿어도 ai강화는 못믿겠네...

[에리타블리제]

미소녀 공략 기능 강화

[CSman]

?..

[멍군 멍게]

다양한 모드 기대 ㅎ